April 4, 2012

I read this paragraph in Levitt and Dubner's Super Freakonomics(highly recommended), on the initially difficult introduction of car seatbelts to the general public, despite that it could save thousands of lives each year in America alone:

The brilliant ration-alist [Robert S. McNamara, then working at Ford] had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature:behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them - smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn't easy.

Precisely. This might as well be the single most deadly weakness of human nature at large.

April 1, 2012

After aeons of dealing with the immense costs from the unpredictabilities of Nature, human beings finally mastered the skill to manipulate the weather as they would like to. Now, just google "weather", and you will see a control panel of your local weather:

But more power also calls for more responsibilities:

Unfortunately, this service of Google probably only lasts for today, so hurry up and make good use of it!